


Sruthlapa

by FortinbrasFTW



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Ireland, Multi, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 11:34:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1145492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FortinbrasFTW/pseuds/FortinbrasFTW
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No one’s <i>exactly</i> sure how it happened, how they all came to be there in a little town on the edge of a hill in a country none of them could rightly call their home. But they had. Perhaps there’s just a time in the lives of some people, when they realize that contentment is the greatest thing they can drag out of this life, and getting there is can be easier than it seems. All it takes really is a small town, and perhaps some unpredictable alignment of fate. It must be what happened to him. How else could he one day take a drive, and another, fifteen years later, end up standing at his window, wearing slippers, drinking earl grey, and considering adding dill to the herb garden this year."</p>
<p>Small stories and comedic adventures of an obscure sea-side Irish village filled with our scrappy array of characters. Inspired by Cranford, Waking Ned Devine, A Room with a View and other narratives too adorable for their own good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sruthlapa

**Author's Note:**

> This won't exactly be a normal story, more like a collection. I wanted to take a town and a bunch of characters and let them run around and, likely, eventually, exhaust themselves. There will likely be larger guiding story coming in at some point, but mainly it's a series of small, anecdotal shorts from various characters, filling out the lives of the town, and updated whenever something worthwhile comes up.
> 
> Mainly, I just wanted to write something cozy.
> 
> PS - Don't hold me too firm on those ships/character lists, I'm still not exactly sure what's going to bubble up. Most, I thought this would start as a Gabriel / Crowley story, but I kinda love the idea of doing something with a friendship as the centerpiece rather than a relationship.

No one’s exactly sure how it happened. A small Irish town by the coast somehow filling up with Americans, and Crowley, which while he quite certainly wasn’t American, he’s arguably even further from Irish. The neighboring towns started to call it the Ex-Patriot Provincial, and apparently titles can prove to be their own manner of self-fulfilling prophecy, because more natives moved out and more misfit Americans moved in and before long the identity had stuck.

All he knows is he was first. That’s the story he’s sticking with, no matter what Gabriel has to say.

Crowley had been first, coming every summer to stay with Gran and “get some air”. Which was really an absurd assignment, even to a boy of eight. But he always liked his Gran and she had always liked him. Adored by grandparents, despised by parents, it was actually a tidy sum up of his pervasive character. That definition had made a situation he might have thought a considerable bore something to actually anticipate during those summers.

If someone had told him then that he might find himself here now, in the same house, in the same town, with very little else, not inside of a penthouse on the high street, with his hand tailored suits, and his everything else, he might have sued them for slander. But that was then. Before the money, before Bella. And this was now. After the corporate “transition”, after the divorce. After everything else that could possibly happen to lead to such an unanticipated turn of events.

He hadn’t meant to stay. How could he? If he’d known he would he certainly would have never come back. But he hadn’t. And he did. It had just been an afternoon, a drive, an impulse. He’d been in Dublin for one of the final closings, watching all of his hard long earned contracts swirl down the toilet of young leadership and thoughtless ambition. Gran had been dead years, so came the impulse. It was his house after all, she’d left it to him, and the way things were turning it might be one of the few assets he had left to his name. Might be worth a sale. At least worth a look.

He’d driven out, and just... stayed. He still can’t say exactly why.

Gabriel said he’d finally come to his senses, that he’d moved on from his Freudian issues to find that life wasn’t an eternal contest, and coming back to the town was how he accepted that. Crowley always insisted someone can’t have Freudian issues if said individual has always wanted to murder both parents. Gabriel always said arguing would never make him forget it was Crowley’s turn to get the next round. He was right about that at least.

Gabriel insisted he’d been there first. Before Crowley, before any of them. He claimed he’d been coming to stay with his own Gran on the other side of town since before he could remember, and certainly since he was five, which since Crowley started when he was eight settled the issue. Crowley insisted that he may have been there earlier himself but could not recall, and that relying facts on immature memories was an idiotic and pathetic attempt at winning an argument.

No matter who had been there first they had both been there together. Gabriel was two years younger, but that had never seemed to matter, even when they were little. There weren’t many other children around the town then, so there wasn’t much to compare and contrast. Gabriel was always ready to prove himself, prepared to jump into any scheme that Crowley could devise. It was probably because he had brothers back home, brothers about the same age as Crowley, but they were never there in the summer. It was always just Gabriel. Brothers came later.

Crowley came back, on an impulse, on a drive, but Gabriel had been there like he’d never left. Teaching early education with a class of six children in small drafty classroom with construction paper on his head. Gabriel had left, for a time, then he’d found his way back as well, with his own divorce under his belt and a newfound appreciation for escapism.

Ex-Patriot Provincial started to take shape out of an otherwise standard village around the time of Gabriel's return. As he told it, he hadn’t been back more than three months before his brother decided a change sounded like a worthwhile concept. The younger brother if there ever was one, with his broody sea-storm eyes, permanent bed-head, and unseasonable outerwear. He’d appear out of the dark one night with a child that wasn’t his but held onto him like it was. Claire. A friend’s child, someone who had “needed him” and he’d “failed to help”, he said. Crowley doubted that was the case, he couldn’t see Castiel failing anyone, at least not with any sense of malice that would justify guilt. But Castiel had a flair for the melodramatic and a habit of accumulating penitence. So, Castiel joined his brother, with an adopted daughter who collected shells on the beach that her “Da” always helped her tie up along their garden to dangle in the breeze off the sea.

Crowley had only just settled into Gran’s old house, made sure the scotch cabinet was as well appointed as it should be, and gotten ride of that lingering fish-oil smell in the second bedroom, when Americana appeared one day in a vehicle comprised half of masculinity substitute and half planetary destruction.

A fishing boat isn’t something that Crowley himself would have traveled across an ocean and changed nationalities for, but that was one of the smallest differences between himself and Dean Winchester.

Dean Winchester hardly knew anything about fish when he arrived and even less about the ocean, and the town at large had given him a month, two at the most. Crowley had played bookie on that particular bet, and in the end came out on top as a month came, and went, and Dean Winchester was still there, waking up at the crack of dawn and heading out into the mist. And the strange thing was, he started to get decent at it.

The boat had been an inheritance, and for someone as sentimental as America’s Darling, apparently that meant something. Winchester’s parents had been dead for years, and when his uncle, family friend, something (Crowley and Gabriel had never really been able to suss it all out), someone named Singer, had died as well, he’d left him a fishing boat. No one had ever seen Singer. Gabriel insisted he had once when he was little but Crowley was sure he was full of it. Apparently it had been something ancestral, so who knows if Singer himself had ever even laid eyes on what he left for the poor bastard. But Crowley was sure that with men who seem to possess a generally above average intelligence and can easily suss out the face that the trip here to claim an inheritance was worth more than the inheritance itself, there was something sentimental directing the rudder. Maybe when god closes a door, Singer opens a window.

Fuzzy details and sentimental assumptions aside, Dean Winchester had a fishing boat, and then before too long there was another American on the docks, bigger, with softer eyes and a sharper smile, trying his southern drawl around all the local shops, heading out into the mist on the boat every morning and unloading the catch on the rickety old dock every afternoon.

Benny, he said his name was, or rather, as he put it, “the name is”. And if people wondered about where Dean had come from, Benny was a whole new level of enigma. Gabriel told his classes that Benny was an acclaimed alligator bounty hunter from the swamps of Louisiana, famous for his crocodile gumbo, and that Dean really kept him on the boat to fight any sharks off of their daily catch. Crowley wondered sometimes what would happen to Gabriel’s imagination if it didn’t have the release valve of an audience of seven year-olds at his constant disposal.

After Benny came the gingers: two of them, from opposite ends of the world. Crowley actually couldn’t remember which one of them got there first. There was Winchester’s friend from the states, who magically provided the town with internet at triple the speed that was available anywhere outside of Dublin within a weekend. Then there was the Milton, Anna, a cousin Gabriel hardly knew and Cas hadn’t seen in years who bought a farm on the top of the hill after struggling with a marketing firm in Beijing since she left school in California.

Miltons and Winchester’s tag-alongs, the entire situation was setting the stage for some medieval feud.

It was around that time that he decided it might be a good idea to purchase whatever empty houses were hanging around the village. He’d sold them all again within the next three years.

Another Winchester appeared, but this one didn’t turn his attention to the fishing boat. He looked tired, which Crowley put down to being altogether too tall for a proper human being, but he came to town all the same. Before too long he’d bought the old pub and turned it around into something functioning, with just the right combination of nostalgia and modernity, seven taps, a decent dinner, and darts league on Wednesdays.

Ex-Patriot Provincial acquired constables not long after, two of them, who were probably the strangest transplants in their little alien community. Both American, as the trend seemed to be persisting: Henriksen and Mills on duty and Victor and Jody off. Crowley was still seriously considering selling their descriptions to the BBC for their next procedural crime drama. Only unlike that standard plot formula their constables weren’t a detective and a sergeant, and consequently couldn’t seem to ever decide who was in charge of who.

Then there was Ruby who came for Anna and stayed for the farm. And then there was Meg who came for Ruby and stayed to apparently make Crowley’s life just that much more irritating on a daily basis.

There was Kevin, boy wonder, who after two years at Oxford was apparently academically required to be put into isolation so his unprecedented Mesopotamian translation skills could be allowed the space and freedom they needed to flourish. He took the small cottage by the sea a year or so ago, and came into town for bangers, vitamin drinks, and occasionally a good deal more pints than someone of his constitution was equipped to handle.

Another Milton wandered in, even if he never quite stayed. Luke, with his holiday house up on the hill, who came for Christmas and the occasional summer weekend.

Gabriel had wandered into Crowley’s at 2AM trailing and empty bottle of scotch when the news first came, and had stayed in much the same state for about a week before finally accepting the situation. The truth was Crowley almost liked Luke, at least for the several weeks of the year he spent there. And once the first truly harrowing Christmas was out of the way, Gabriel seemed to enjoy him even more. Claire loved him, which Crowley could see both pleased and disturbed Castiel on a deeply emotional level.

And so, no one’s _exactly_ sure how it happened, how they all came to be there in a little town on the edge of a hill in a country none of them could rightly call their home. But they had. Perhaps there’s just a time in the lives of some people, when they realize that contentment is the greatest thing they can drag out of this life, and getting there is can be easier than it seems. All it takes really is a small town, and perhaps some unpredictable alignment of fate. It must be what happened to him. How else could he one day take a drive, and another day, fifteen years later, end up standing at his window, wearing slippers, drinking earl grey, and considering adding dill to the herb garden this year.

Perhaps everyone, no matter how much of a bastard they might be, or how ill-deserving they may seem, is destined at some point in their lives to stumble, maybe accidentally, certainly haphazardly, into a friendship. And maybe some people, if they’re lucky, have the good sense to not pull themselves back out again.


End file.
